'Rogue One' editors reveal what was changed about the movie in reshoots

Warning: Spoilers below if you haven’t seen “Rogue One.”
In the latest reveal of what went on behind the scenes of “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” Yahoo UK spoke to two editors on the film, John Gilroy and Colin Goudie, who divulged some interesting insight on putting together the “Star Wars” standalone movie, which got a lot of attention for its reshoots.

Goudie, who also edited “Rogue One” director Gareth Edwards’ breakout 2010 movie “Monsters,” had been involved since the beginning of production on the “Star Wars” spin-off, along with editor Jabez Olssen (“The Hobbit” trilogy). Gilroy was called on last summer when his brother, Tony Gilroy, was hired to do the reshoots.

In the lengthy interview, both delve into their contribution to the project — like Goudie using an interrogation scene from “Aliens” as a reference point for how to cut Jyn (Felicity Jones) being interrogated by the Rebels in the movie, or Gilroy talking about calling in actor Angus MacInnes to rerecord dialogue for outtakes of himself as Gold Leader from the original 1977 “Star Wars” that were repurposed in “Rogue One.”

But the most revealing recollections are about the reshoots.

“They gave you the film that you see today,” Gilroy said of what was redone over the summer.

Introduction scenes like Cassian (Diego Luna) meeting with the spy who tells him about the Empire making a “planet killer” weapon and Bodhi (Riz Ahmed) being led to meet Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker) were added in the reshoots. The added filming also provided a scene in which Jyn breaks out of the transporter thanks to the Rebels.

Goudie says originally we met Jyn and Cassian in the scene in which Jyn is interrogated by the Rebels and offered the mission to track down Saw Gerrera.

“[The] opening scene, in the prologue, was always the same,” he said. “Jyn’s just a little girl, so when you see her as an adult what you saw initially was her in a meeting. That’s not a nice introduction. So having her in prison and then a prison breakout, with Cassian on a mission… Everybody was a bit more ballsy, or a bit more exciting, and a bit more interesting. They got there eventually in the film, but this way we came in on the ground running, which was better.”

And the last part of the movie “changed quite a bit,” according to Gilroy, who stays vague about specifics.

“The mechanics of the [third] act changed quite a bit in terms of the characters, and I don’t want to go into too much detail about what had been there before, but it was different,” he said. “We moved some of the things that our heroes did, they were different in the original then they were as it was conceived. Everything was connected to everything so doing something to one venue would change all the other venues, so really we had to… We were working on that until the last minute.”

But fans’ hopes of a lot of deleted scenes or an extended cut that shows a very different movie — which “Rogue One” star Ben Mendelsohn hinted at recently — in future Blu-ray releases may be premature.

Gilroy couldn’t think of any scenes that were left on the cutting-room floor that are worth showcasing and Goudie said the first assembly of the film isn’t much longer than the finished cut.

“Maybe 10 minutes longer?” he said. “I genuinely can’t remember because that was nearly a year ago now. There’s no mythical four-hour cut, it doesn’t exist.”